What gave you the idea for The Best Day? It all began the summer after I graduated from Uni when I was trying to organize a weekend getaway with a group of my high school friends. We were in the throes of that all too familiar back-and-forth messaging madness when I eventually cracked it and got a piece of paper, wrote down our names and started to sort through the endless stream of Facebook, email and SMS messages to mark down everyone’s availabilities. Suddenly, it hit me: there had to be an easier way! It didn’t make sense that something so common as making plans was such a frustrating waste of time. I knew I couldn’t be alone with this first world problem so I decided to build a planning tool that would at last help us save time and get offline.
What made you think people would want to use it? I think that it is a pretty universal feeling that planning sucks. It’s one of the least enjoyable ways that we spend our time online so I always felt confident that the problem was there. To be a bit more professional than my instinct we did conduct a survey of 1,000 Australians that revealed that we send 5-10 messages back and forth to agree on a plan and that 94% of us find it frustrating! The real question is if people will want to try an easier way? It’s hard to change habits so that’s why we have to continue to work to make the app and website as easy to use as possible.
What did you have to take into consideration when developing TBD? Did you have any previous experience in app development? I literally had no clue what I was doing when I started on this adventure. I had just finished a completely irrelevant degree in Politics so I knew nothing about business or technology. After I had the idea I started looking around on the internet to see if I could find anything that did what I was looking for, I guess you could call it market research but it didn’t feel that legitimate at the time. When it became clear that nothing was solving the problem in a mainstream way I started to work on figuring out the logic of the app by sketching outlines of the pages, what I now know as ‘wireframing’. It took me six months of creating this outline after work to stop questioning, “who am I to start a web business?” and just go for it.
What advice would you give to an aspiring app developer? If you, like me, don’t know how to write code the number one thing you need to do is find someone who can to work with you. It’s modern day role reversal: the ‘cool’ kid must court the ‘computer nerd’ to help them make it. The reason is that you need to see the development of your app as an ongoing process with your job to continually listen to user feedback and adjust your vision. If you have a technical partner on board you can work together to build small pieces of the app and test them out gradually. It’s a hipster start-up movement called Agile Development! The second thing I’d say is that if you are determined to make it big you’re going to eventually need to raise funding from investors. I’ve found it incredibly helpful to get to know some successful entrepreneurs who have been able to counter my blind optimism with some thoughtful reality checks about business models, growth expectations and other serious things that Wikipedia didn’t tell me about.
How has TBD changed over time from its initial idea to its conception? The core idea of ending the hassle of back-and-forth scheduling madness by making it easy for a group to vote on some options has remained almost exactly the same. What changes constantly is how we’re actually going to do this! I’ve completely redesigned the website and app from the feedback we got on the prototype and we’re in currently in Beta testing so are making a lot of changes to the flow and design. The business model has also evolved big time, which is to be expected considering I didn’t have one to begin with. A huge idea that has developed over time is to utilize our planning technology to make it easy for businesses to get their customers to plan to do their activities. It’s my brain juice though so I’m going to keep the details on the DL until our partnerships go live.
Where do you see The Best Day 365 best days later? I’ve just returned from a trip to the Valley where I was meeting with some US investors who are interested in funding the next year of this adventure which is very exciting. My vision for TBD is ridiculously ambitious but in this startup world if your goal isn’t crazy you’re not thinking big enough. If you think of Facebook as the platform on which we share what we like and businesses connect with us based on these interests and Twitter as the platform for what we are thinking, and Google what we are searching for, I want TBD to be the platform for what we’re doing. So in a year I hope to be launched in the US and well on the way to earning that comparison.
Which aspects do you see as the most crucial when designing an app? The 100% most important thing which I learnt the hard way is to follow the principles of Agile Development. Eric Ries is the author behind this ‘Lean Startup’ movement which emphasizes designing and building a MVP (minimum viable product) and testing the hell out of it each step of the way. Worry about getting the UX (user experience) smooth before bothering to make it look pretty with styling and fancy designs.
Did you ever feel like giving up? Definitely! This adventure is a roller coaster. Fortunately I seem to be trapped in my cart, as while I have occasionally been terrified with my hands flailing in the air in the midst of some sharp dips, I am unable to quit the ride and quickly shoot back up again. OK I’m done with this cliché metaphor now.
When I first started I hired a web designer to create each page of the website from my outline. I then took these polished designs to a developer to build them. Only when the website was completed did I ask users to test it out. Big mistake, huge mistake! I had created the site in what I now refer to as the ‘cave’ and hadn’t sought feedback from users when it was easy to make adjustments. I ended up having to completely scrap what I’d spent a year and all my funding creating. I had to take the positive from the situation, that a lot of people had tried to use it, raise some investment from family and friends, find a developer to join me on the journey and start creating the app from scratch.
Obviously you have to ensure the app works smoothly on all phone types, how have you found TBD performs on the Huawei? It’s bananas how many different devices you have to build for and we are only just tweaking the mobile website to work on Android phones at the moment but I’ve been amazed at how smooth the Huawei is! I love the sounds it makes and the big screen makes it possible to see the entire plan on the mobile site, which is awesome. It’s also insanely light which is handy for me as this one time I smashed my iPhone screen when I went to lightly toss it onto my bed but had a brain snap and instead went for a softball style overarm throw and accidentally threw it really hard against my window, the Huawei would have survived this abuse. We are hoping to release the Android and iPhone app in the next month or two and I can’t wait to see TBD in all its glory on the Huawei.
An app like TBD helps to clarify that inevitable stream of mixed messages, indecision and lateness that arises when you try to organize an event with more than two people. If you could develop an app to counter another pet peeve, like tardiness, which would you want to address next? I would develop an app that using augmented reality technology to help me read a social situation to see if I should be going for a hand shake, kiss on cheek, hug, kiss and shake, double kiss, kiss hug and shake or wave greeting. It is actually a really big issue for me. I overanalyze these sorts of social skills on my blog but I need something to help me in the moment of awkwardness! Alternatively, I’d build an app called ‘Three Nice Things’ where friends can anonymously list compliments about each other so that they receive three nice things a day. My sister and I play this game with each other all the time and we think more people need to say three nice things about each other.
Along with the mobile app, TBD also has a really user-friendly web component, and some pretty thorough email notifications. Do you have an incredibly highly-regimented social life? TBD sure is a beast of an application, we’ve got a desktop website, mobile website and native phone apps coming soon! We’ve also built an SMS gateway so that users on the phone app can simply select contacts from their phonebook to send a text invitation to the plan. We have to be platform agnostic because the most important thing we can do is ensure that anyone who receives a plan invitation can respond to it so it’s taken a lot of upfront work to be ready to launch across every device. The user experience on the prototype was not great; the site was overly designed with too many options to choose between which caused it to become very complicated. However, now after a total redesign we are receiving really positive feedback on the Beta site on both desktop and mobile. We’ve completely stripped back the features to focus on trying to get the core things right, hopefully it’s easy to use! Ironically, I am absolutely terrible at making plans so my social life is actually very flaky normally. Thank the lord for TBD!
What would your best day consist of? The best day for me would be as follows: wake up slightly hungover so I start the day feeling like I’m fun, recover immediately, have breakfast with my family in the sun on our back deck, drive to the beach for a surf with my friends, though I can’t actually surf at all, feel refreshed and tanned like an awesome Australian, grab a burrito and corona for a late lunch, take a nap in a hammock, make a plan on TBD, have a few drinks at someone’s house and play charades. The end.
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